


Where I'm going

by disappointionist



Category: Game Grumps
Genre: Confessions, Fluff, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-01
Updated: 2016-08-01
Packaged: 2018-07-28 16:35:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,840
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7648420
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/disappointionist/pseuds/disappointionist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>'Arin looks up from his laptop and Dan is curled up in some kind of yoga pretzel. Barely minutes later he's hanging off the edge of the couch. Dan doesn't seem to keep still for longer than a minute at a time, notebook braced against whatever semi-flat or steady surface is closest.'</p>
            </blockquote>





	Where I'm going

_Spring_

 

Writing wasn’t what Arin had expected Dan to want do in Arin’s living room on a Sunday morning, but apparently that is the only thing Dan has the intention of doing. Beyond the initial four repetitions of thanks that Dan managed between the door and the living room, he barely acknowledges Arin at all. After sitting down on the couch, he starts to scribble away in his notebook within seconds. 

It started with a text: ‘Please let me come hang out at your house, this Starbucks seems to be having a mom and baby meetup going and it’s LOUD.’

Even though it lacked further explanation, Arin texted back a ‘sure, come over’. Suzy had left to run errands, and Arin was already up and working, answering e-mails and occasionally fooling himself into writing something for a bit, glaring at his computer while re-working sentences in his head.

 

Whatever Dan didn’t accomplish at the Starbucks seems to have fallen into place on Arin's couch. Arin can tick off nearly all the signs of Dan's writing going well for him. He knows fairly well by now how Dan works, since was there for some of Starbomb and when he wasn’t they still texted a lot.

When Dan is stuck, he will lean over a coffee cup and his notes, pressing the pencil a little too hard onto the paper or scrolling through something on his phone with a deep frown. Dan’s writing process in a flow on the other hand, includes every sitting and lying position one can imagine.

Arin looks up from his laptop and Dan is curled up in some kind of yoga pretzel. Barely minutes later he's hanging off the edge of the couch. He doesn't seem to keep still for longer than a minute at a time, notebook braced oddly against whatever semi-flat or steady surface is closest. Arin hasn’t been around Dan while writing like this in ages, and it makes it more endearing to him that Dan would want to be at Arin’s when his try at Starbucks hadn’t worked out.

After about an hour, Arin offers Dan coffee and a sandwich, which Dan accepts with yet another thank you, making it the fifth of the day and still the only thing Dan has said at all. They eat in their opposite ends of the room, Dan leaning one elbow on the coffee table, trying to eat and write simultaneously, while Arin concentrates on his computer to keep himself from laughing when Dan tries to take a bite off his pencil.

 

It’s early evening when Dan sneaks up next to Arin, startling him when he brushes against his side.

Arin pulls his headphones off, watching Dan sit down on the table without hesitation. The notebook he had been writing in probably left somewhere by the couch.

“You should be done working,” Dan says.

“Should I?” Arin raises his brow. “Is that just because you are, Dan?”

“If I am, then you absolutely should have quit like, two hours ago,” Dan points out.

This makes Arin smile, and he puts his headphones down next to the laptop, saving the draft of his current e-mail.

“Are you working on NSP?” Arin asks, turning in his chair, so that his knee presses against Dan’s right leg.  
  
“Nah,” Dan shakes his head. “I don’t think so.”

“Hm,” Arin says, trying not to make it sound like a question or surprise, because he doesn’t want Dan to feel like he has to explain.

“Maybe nothing,” Dan says, smiling. “Or something completely different. It just happened.”

“Dude, I could tell,” Arin says, regretting it when Dan gives him a curious look.

“Yeah?” Dan asks.

“You just… shift around a lot when you’re writing well,” Arin points out, regretting that too.

“So you were watching me?” Dan says, smile widening further.

“Well it would be weird not to when I'm like, giving you food and stuff,” Arin says, feigning annoyance.

“Sure,” Dan says, nudging Arin’s arm. “Thanks, for letting me stick around.”

“Oh. Well, any time,” Arin says, caving in to give Dan a smile back. “Do you have time to stay for dinner?” he asks.

Dan hesitates. “No.” He sighs. “I should probably go.”

There’s a slight pause, and Arin notes that Dan isn’t moving away from the table.

“Okay,” Arin says, because he can’t just be quiet.

“I’ll see you tomorrow for a bit,” Dan says. He reaches out, hand hovering in the air above Arin's hair. “Tell Scuze I said hi.”

“I will,” Arin says, lifting himself up to headbutt Dan’s hand.

Dan smiles, running his hand over the top of Arin’s head before he slides off the table. Arin watches Mochi and Mimi follow Dan halfway out of the room before realizing that he’s not going to the kitchen, instantly changing their course. Mochi starts pawing at a piece of paper sticking out over the edge coffee table just as Dan shouts “Bye”, waiting for Arin's reply before shutting the front door.

 

The paper is intentionally torn out, folded in half and has none of the crossed out signs of mistakes or scrap notes that Dan will sometimes be frustrated with enough to throw away. Arin takes it from the table to Mochi’s disappointment, unfolding it to the sound of Dan starting his car in the driveway. _‘Just like fireflies, briefly held, meant to be let go.’_

Arin folds the note back up and sticks it into one of the pockets of his calendar, where he won’t lose it.

 

* * *

 

_Fall_

 

They listen to the new Skyhill song in the car on their way to one of their favorite hiking spots, and Arin wishes that he wasn’t driving so that he could close his eyes and listen.

“Wow, time flies, dude. It feels like it was yesterday you wrote this,” Arin says when the song is over. He thinks about the soft paper note in his calendar, the one that's starting to feel like a piece of a puzzle.

“I was there for that, right?” he asks.

“Yeah,” Dan says. “Of course you were.”

Arin shoots him an inquisitive look, wondering if Dan meant it in place of an 'obviously', even when there wasn’t anything obvious about it.

“It's amazing,” Arin says when Dan doesn’t elaborate.

“Thank you,” Dan says. “It felt good. To write. I guess sometimes you just feel something so much that you have to get it out. NSP isn't always the ideal outlet.”

“Yeah, I understand that. There is only so much you can get into a song about dicks after all,” Arin says, and they share a smile.

 

When he's parked the car, Arin plays the song once more, just closing his eyes and letting himself be enveloped by the music, and lyrics and Dan’s voice. He fights the urge to reach for Dan’s hand, because for some reason it seems too intimate. Even if they have touched that way and more hundreds of times, it feels out of place in the context of the front seat of the car, surrounded by the ache of Dan’s lyrics.

 

Neither of them really has the time for a long hike, so they settle for the shorter, circular trail. They’re there in the first place because Dan said he needed a break to do something outdoors, away from people.

“It had a different working title,” Dan says when they round a bend on the path.

Arin is looking down at his feet, because this part of the trail can sometimes be broken up by roots sticking up through the ground.

“Yeah?” Arin asks.

“Yeah,” Dan says, as if that’s all there is.

As they keep walking in silence, Arin feels like he’s waiting something out. He finds it unsettling that he’s not really sure what that thing is. Eventually, when Dan doesn’t even open his mouth in an attempt to speak, Arin smiles and turns his attention to the trail ahead.

“We’ve talked about that a lot, haven’t we? What things were almost called?” he asks.

“I think we have,” Dan says, sounding relieved.

“For me it’s like trying to imagine this weird parallel universe where songs and albums I grew up with were like, the same but still something else. Other icons I guess,” he says.

“Yeah. Imagine all the shirts we’d own that would say ‘Wet’ in cyan, magenta and yellow,” Dan says.

When Arin looks at Dan out of the corner of his eye, Dan is smiling again, and he thinks that he’s grateful that whatever it is that Dan is only half telling him, it can still make room for that warm smile. 

"We should probably have three of those made, just for fun," Arin says, and Dan laughs. They keep that conversation up, since it's one they're not ever going to grow tired of, and because they both gather up new examples between times. 

 

“Arin,” Dan says suddenly,  when the conversation has faded into merely their steps against gravel.

“Yes?” Arin looks up and meets Dan’s eye.

Dan shakes his head. “No. The-, the title,” he says.

“Wait. What?” Arin asks, interrupting his walk, without thinking about it. He doesn’t mean for it to sound so sudden or loud, but it does, bouncing out into the wilderness. Dan looks scared and ready to leave, and Arin's heart is beating really fast.

“Don't go,” Arin says quickly, lowering his voice, hoping that it will be enough.

“We’re on a hiking trail, Arin. You drove us here, I have nowhere to go,” Dan reminds him.

“You could catch an uber, what do I know,” Arin protests.

“Arin,” Dan says sharply. He’s frowning and it makes Arin’s stomach twist.

“You wrote a song with my name,” Arin says, his voice soft.

“Yes,” Dan says.

“You wrote a song about me?” He knows it might sound dumb, but he has to ask, because somehow that seems to be the first in the row of parts that are neither sinking in, nor connecting in his mind.

“Yes,” Dan says again, and his voice has a kind of finality to it.

Arin hesitates, and then, when he manages anything at all, it just comes out as “Dude.”

They're quiet for a long time, and Arin starts walking again just to make sure that he's doing something. Dan falls into step next to him, nearly arm to arm every other step.

“I mean... it's mostly about letting go. Of all the stuff that's in my past… like the hard stuff and the shit I went through to write the first album and I-,” Dan cuts himself off, glancing at Arin. “In a lot of ways it’s about finding you, I guess.”

“That’s… Dan,” Arin says fondly. He smiles, reaching for Dan’s elbow and squeezing it. It’s not that he doesn’t know what to say, it’s just that whatever expressions of gratitude he defaults to, it won’t feel like enough. “No one's ever done that for me,” he says. Which isn't enough either, not entirely the right words, but he’s trying to find out what it means, and that’s difficult when his mind is jumbled up.

 

“I, I need to tell you something,” Dan says, as if on cue.

Arin is glad that he’s still holding onto Dan, unsure that he even could let go now if he wanted to. It’s like he knows, because he’s heard this before. But then, at the same time it doesn’t make sense because this is Dan, but not the Dan he’s come to expect. This is Dan who wrote a song for him and who keeps pausing to take shallow breaths while speaking and who isn’t really meeting his eye. It’s not his Dan, and still, Arin thinks, it might be more his Dan than any side of him that Arin has ever encountered before.

“It’s both way overdue and way too early to say this. But... fuck, here we go.” Pausing, Dan’s gaze fixes on Arin’s cheek. “At the beginning of this year I had to re-evaluate a lot of which I thought I knew about myself,” Dan says. “Because I realized I was already more than halfway in love with another guy. So I had to… figure out this new thing. Except it turned out that it kind of wasn’t a general thing, or maybe I was too hung up on this… on you, Arin. And I don’t think it matters other than that I haven’t been able to just get over it.”

 

“I... shit,” Arin says, which is not the well-thought out sentence he had built in his head, but what comes to him when he opens his mouth.

“It's fine,” Dan says, shrugging so that Arin loses the grip on his elbow.

“Dan,” Arin says, wrapping his hand around Dan’s wrist instead. It’s still not enough, and all the right words are still just out of his reach.

“What?” Dan asks him, looking down at the ground.

“I'm not turning you down, you asshole,” Arin says, even though he knows that it’s probably the least romantic way he could put it.

“You're not?” Dan finally looks up, eyes fixing on Arin’s.

“You wrote me a song,” Arin says, sounding relieved when it feels like it finally sinks in.

“Yes. And you're my best friend. And married,” Dan says quietly.

“I honestly don't see why you're even presenting the first one as a problem and as for the second one, it will work out,” Arin says.

Dan looks away again, his mouth twisting into something pained. “Don't fuck with me Arin.”

“You think I would? After all that?” Arin asks in a soft tone.

“No. Not really,” Dan says. He sighs, defeated, shoulders slumping.

“Good,” Arin says, letting his fingers brush slowly back and forth over Dan’s skin. Dan shuts his eyes when he does. “Then trust me when I tell you that Suzy told me it was fine when I first got to know you and I wouldn't shut up about you for more than fifteen minutes at a time, and she assumed I had a really bad crush or possibly was just straight up in love with you.”

“And were you?” Dan asks. It sounds a little like a challenge.

“Not then,” Arin says, shaking his head, because he hadn’t been, for years he hadn’t been.

“And now?” Dan wraps his other hand around Arin’s where it rests on his wrist.

“Honestly?” Arin smiles sheepishly. “How couldn't I be? I mean, look at you.”

Dan laughs, and when he stops, the smile stays on his face. “I’d say that’s so cheesy, but I wrote you a song and recorded it.”

“Yeah, we’re both acting like we’re in a fucking 80s movie,” Arin tells him.

“So... which one of us is Molly Ringwald?” Dan asks.

“I think the beauty of it is that none of us have to be,” Arin says. “And I’m not sure she’d be on a hiking trail. Elisabeth Shue on the other hand…” He trails off when Dan starts laughing again.

“I can be down with that. With a great soundtrack, obviously,” Dan says.

“Can’t fight this feeling, I think,” Arin says, pauses before asking, a little softer. “Sing it to me?”

“We’re on a hiking trail Arin,” Dan says.

“You’d sing it to me in the movie, right at this moment and you know it,” Arin reminds him, his lips curled in a seemingly permanent half-smile.

“Fine,” Dan says, bending his head until it rests on Arin’s shoulder. “I can’t fight this feeling any longer, and yet I’m still afraid to let it flow, What started off as-,” he sings

“Dan,” Arin says, interrupting him. “Not that one, although it goes great with the view.”

Dan is quiet at first, then he tilts his head up, and his eyes look almost pale when they reflect the sky. 

“I woke up on a wave that crashes, when will the tide return,“ he sings, flowing softly through the first verse. 

 

Arin tugs Dan to a halt when Dan stops singing.

“Can I kiss you?” he asks quickly, before he has the time to think twice. 

Dan doesn't reply, but neither does he look like he's about to bolt anymore, so Arin shifts his hand so that he can hold on to Dan's.

“I'm right here. That's where you're going,” Arin says, and he hopes it's the right thing, hopes that he knows Dan as well as he thinks he does.

“Yes,” Dan says.

The word is breathy, and it echoes infinitely in Arin's head as he leans in and kisses Dan. Arin thinks that it’s softer than he imagined it, because when he had dared to, he had always thought it would be more of an act of desperation, an output for something they’d deny that they needed. This is nothing at all like that.

“We are,” Arin says against Dan’s lips, understanding for a moment how the puzzle is supposed to fit together.

“We are,” Dan answers, pressing himself closer, arms wrapped around Arin’s waist.

 

**Author's Note:**

> This was written on anon request (at my grumps tumblr damnavidans) for a fic where 'Firefly' was written about Dan letting go of his old life and falling for Arin.


End file.
